A prediction about Mitt Romney

January 9, 2012 - Mike Maneval

As midnight strikes and Monday becomes Tuesday, New Hampshire primary voters will begin to cast ballots to determine which candidate for president the state's delegates to the 2012 Republican convention prefer. Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney is expected to win, and likely by double-digits. As governor of Massachusetts, Romney, according to Deroy Murdock writing for the conservative publication Human Events, tripled the state's fee for gun registrations, doubled the fee for marriage licenses, implemented a used-car tax that cost the state's consumers $10 million in 2003 alone, and also in that year increased 86 other fees on residents.

As governor, Romney championed a proposal to use tax dollars to underwrite business expenses, giving $2,000 grants to select businesses and corporations to cover employee training costs. In defending this strand of corporate welfare in his book, "No Apologies," Romney suggested that encouraging management and investors to suckle at the public teat was about preventing expenses from being "borne by the few."

He made this claim in 2010, about a decade after federal taxes on inheritances were drastically cut and larger sums allowed to go untaxed and after a period of time, as ABCNews.com noted in August, when working middle-class Americans saw wages stagnant or fall, even as consumer prices, particularly for health insurance and gasoline, continued to generally climb.

Romney is blind to decades of sacrifices by labor. And while I will not offer a prediction on whether Romney prevails against his rivals for the nomination and certainly not on whether the Republican nominee will prevail in the fall, I will offer one prediction: If Romney wins, we can expect the bank accounts of working American families to shrink as Romney shifts the burdens of funding civil society and even the burdens of funding business expenses investors and managers choose to neglect onto the middle class.